Every few months someone recycles a listicle featuring the morning routines of highly successful people as if — and this is the truly maddening part — their morning routine was the key to their success.
The whole message feels analogous to giving someone chocolate chips and saying, “Hey, you’re welcome. Now go bake a chocolate chip cookie”.
The chocolate chips are necessary but not alone sufficient for making a chocolate chip cookie.
The ingredient is not the recipe.
There is an additional somewhat vexing message implied in these listicles which is that we’re all somehow the same phenotype — that is, what works for someone else will surely work for us in perfect copy-and-paste fashion.
Like clothes at the store, there’s nothing wrong with trying on wisdom for size. Sometimes they’ll be a great fit and sometimes they won’t. When they don’t fit, we need not take issue with ourselves and why we can’t magically fit into to the mold of everything. It just means — all it means — is that it doesn’t work for you and you can try something else.
Maybe waking up at 5AM will change your world; maybe it will wreck it.
Maybe copying all the advice from that one respected peer will unlock new and meaningful connections; or maybe it will prove to be a mismatch for your situation and alienate you within your group.
Maybe these things will work in one phase or aspect or your life but not the other.
There are very few rules when it comes to figuring out how to best tackle the challenges you’re faced with.
